


Good Intentions

by SylvanWitch



Category: Stargate: Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-25
Updated: 2012-03-25
Packaged: 2017-11-02 13:00:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/369239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of episode tags based on the first half of season three, these stories follow our intrepid heroes on the road to hell, which is sometimes the Pegasus Galaxy and sometimes just the nature of their relationship.  These stories assume all of the events of "Keep the Home Fires Burning," but you do not need to have read those stories to understand these.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Abandon Hope

**Author's Note:**

> This story contains mild spoilers for _No Man's Land_ and _Misbegotten_ , Episodes 3.01 and 3.02, respectively. The series title is taken from that familiar aphorism about the road to hell. The story title comes from Dante's Inferno, in which, inscribed over the gates of hell, are the words: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." The story marks the beginning of my third seasons series and picks up where my second season series, _Keep the Home Fires Burning_ left off.

John and Ronon were standing four feet apart in "their" room, and the look the big man was giving him was familiar.

Ronon wanted to rip John's guts out and perhaps make a nice doily of them.

 _Okay_ , John thought, _Ronon probably doesn't know how to make doilies._

That didn't change the Satedan's clear intentions, which right now ran to bodily harm of the grievous variety.

Thankfully, they were sharing the room with four marines, two engineers, and Rodney, who took up more space than John thought the room might reasonably allow. _Of course, if you believed "string theory," there were an infinite number of Rodneys..._

John shook his head free of that particular horror, shrugging away from the console on which he'd been leaning and proceeding to repeat the same set of slow steps that he'd been making at intervals for the past forty-fives minutes. Once around the room clockwise. Once counter.

Both times, he passed Ronon. Neither time did he pause by even a fraction of a step nor acknowledge the man in any way. The seven other people may as well have been invisible and silent for all it mattered to the two of them: they weren't talking when alone, either.

John stopped for the umpteenth time behind McKay, close enough to breathe on him when he said, "McKay, I don't think you're trying hard enough. Maybe I should have Ronon here threaten you."

Rodney shot a distracted glance at Ronon, who was standing in his usual pose, deceptively still, a predator alert for prey. They all knew how quickly the warrior could move when he had to. And that's why he was there.

John was there to turn things on...present company emphatically excluded.

And Ronon was there to shoot them should they get out of hand—the things that John turned on, that is, not the present company.

John figured if Ronon had been there to shoot people, his commanding officer was first on the Satedan's list. Maybe even ahead of the Wraith bastards who'd captured him...again...the last time.

John backed away from Rodney, choosing a different console to slouch against in his own disingenuously casual pose. In truth, there was nothing casual about John—not when he was on the job, and certainly not in this room. Not now, anyway, when it was occupied by the invaders.

He swallowed the resentment that rose in the back of his throat, bitter and hot. He knew—they'd known—it would come to this eventually. Of course, John had hoped the room would turn out to be useless, since besides the lights, which answered his every command obligingly, nothing else had ever lit up or turned on when John touched it.

And a lot of John had touched a lot of things in this room.

Rodney, however, had almost immediately squelched John's hope by opening a panel of crystals, dulled to dusty hues, and saying, "A-ha!" (Indeed, the physicist was one of the few people John had ever heard say that. He and John's fifth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Starkweather, who'd caught him in the coat closet one Tuesday afternoon with Susie Rodriguez, who hadn't started crying until _after_ they'd gotten caught). Rodney's exclamation had been followed by technobabble liberally peppered with superiority, which John translated for Ronon's benefit: "He says that this laboratory has been cut off from the main power grid and that its secondary power systems were also severed."

Ronon didn't even blink, but two of the four marines shifted slightly in place, tightening their hold on their weapons.

"Uh, Rodney," John had added almost immediately. "If the Ancients didn't want this lab powered up, do you think it's a good idea for us to be fooling around with it? I mean, we haven't exactly had good luck experimenting with _accidentally_ defunct labs, much less the ones that were deliberately disconnected from both the primary and secondary power grids."

"What?" Rodney said, eyes glued to his read-outs. "Oh," he managed, finally. "Yes, yes, danger and all that. That's why you're here. You and your," here he waved his hand vaguely at the small contingent of marines, apparently including Ronon, "platoon, or what have you."

And then Rodney was lost again in calculations. Where he'd remained for what seemed to John an interminable amount of time.

Things had occasionally lit up and then powered down almost at once, the only exception being the central console, which shone with a steady blue light and caused Rodney to "Hmmm" eight times. John had counted.

He'd also counted the octagonal ceiling tiles, the number of triangles in the symmetrically patterned floor, and the individual places around the room where he and Ronon had...

It didn't matter now. It didn't matter that the central console that Rodney had disemboweled and was now humming over was the support against which Ronon had braced himself when he'd first offered himself completely to John.

It didn't matter that Lt. Albano was standing in front of the spot on the wall where Ronon had driven John in a fit of desperate passion, his longer leg between John's thighs an insistent upward pressure until John had been on tiptoes, swearing and pleading both against Ronon's straining neck.

And it sure as hell didn't matter that John himself was standing where their mattress used to be, all remnants of a bed hastily removed when they'd gotten the heads-up from Elizabeth that the room was slated for exploration and possible experimentation.

No, there was no evidence of their passion in this room except for the banked ire in Ronon's heavy gaze and the hollow place in John's stomach where he'd once had a fledgling joy.

Another "Hmmm" from McKay, this one with the upward interrogatory lilt that John had learned meant: "Caution: possible explosions ahead."

"McKay?" he drawled, a similarly questioning lilt in his own voice, one that everyone in the room—engineers included—had heard before and therefore already knew meant: "If you blow me up before lunch, you're going to be in a world of hurt when Beckett releases me from the infirmary."

There was more adjusting of artillery from the marines, this time all four of them honing their focus. John had to force himself not to look over at Ronon, sure he'd see no change in the warrior's stoic demeanor. The man was ready all the time for disaster.

At least the kind that explodes. Apparently, he wasn't as good at intimate catastrophes.

 _That's us_ , John thought, _a personal apocalypse_. He was suddenly weary of waiting to blow up, both literally and figuratively.

Luckily, he didn't have much longer to wait, for he was shaken out of his momentary fugue by sparks and arcing power and the smell of burning ozone. In the second it took John to register the other odor—the sickly-sweet odor he had last smelled so strongly on the hard-pack beneath a shattered bridge and the remains of a Blackhawk that had once held his friends—the shouting ceased, all light in the room died, and he was staring up at the ceiling, wondering how, in all of his counting of tiles, he had missed those burn marks, the charred shapes like clouds in negative.

A face appeared in his line of sight, lips moving, and even before he could register that it was Ronon, he realized he couldn't hear and experienced the momentary panic of a solider who has been stripped of one of the senses he most relied on. He listened hard for anything that might tell him what had happened: the insidious, nasal whine of a Wraith dart; the Hollywood quality of the big cannons mounted around the city's perimeter; the shouted interchange of commands from Caldwell to Weir and back.

Nothing.

He winced, tried to sit up, and felt a searing heat along his torso that made him gasp.

He sucked in another lungful of that sickening smell and knew, then, that it was burned flesh. He remembered Colonel Argen telling them in flight school how men burned just like spitted pigs, same meaty smell, sans the sauce, of course. And they had all chuckled with that false bravado of the young and untested and wondered if blood smelled like hickory when it burned.

"McKay?" he asked, straining his neck to find the scientist. But though the roiling dark was pierced by gun-mounted lights that scored the darkness, he couldn't see anything for the smoke and sudden pain. He laid his head back down, saw Ronon reach out toward him, felt himself pulled up. He tried to say, "McKay" again but got no further than the first sound, which might have morphed into a scream because Ronon was pulling him upward and _god that hurts_ —he put a hand up to his side and every touch was searing agony.

 _Ribs_ , he thought, and then maybe there was another cry, because Ronon was rushing him now and the distance to the door seemed impossible to traverse and he couldn't get his feet under him and he thought he might be babbling and hoped the marines didn't hear because he was pretty sure it was, "Ronon, please, god, please Ronon."

He'd used those words in this room, when it had been softly lit and heated by their stuttering breath and the friction of their joined flesh. He'd used them when Ronon had dragged his nails down the length of John's hard shaft, when he'd taken the nape of John's neck in his teeth and savaged the tender spot, when he'd laved John's spine, knot by knot, until the colonel was sure he would die of pleasure.

Now the room was aflame and he was aflame and he thought he might be begging to die because it hurt, it hurt more than he thought it was possible, and Ronon just kept moving.

"Goddamn you motherfucking cocksucking sonofabitch," he might have said, but he wasn't sure of anything except that his throat had now caught fire and every swallow was blazing misery and no one was listening to him.

He thought he heard the distant percussion of big guns, and he tried to warn Ronon, but before he could form the words they were catapulted forward through suddenly superheated air, and in the very moment that John realized he was flying without wings, he also discerned what that meant, and then gravity took over and he mercifully passed out before he landed.

When he awoke, it was to the rhythmic suspiration of heavy breathing, the kind found in the depths of sleep, and he turned his head with an effort that left him palsied, so weak was he, and saw Ronon asleep in the chair beside his bed.

He tried to reach out to the man but found his hand was liberally bound in white gauze, an IV tube running up through it.

He tried to say, "Hey," but nothing came except a wheezing breath and then a dull and distant pain, the very insistence of which told him that he was on serious painkillers.

Finally, he tapped the IV line against the bed rail, making an anemic sound that nevertheless proved enough to wake the typically watchful Ronon.

As he pushed himself upright and stifled a yawn with his hand, Ronon said, "Hey," eyes skittering over John's own and then away toward some safe point in the middle distance.

John tried to answer back, but again there was nothing except the muted wheeze. Ronon reached for something out of John's sight and brought back a cup of water, straw already bent and canted toward John's waiting lips.

"Take it slow," Ronon cautioned, still not looking John in the eye.

John nodded, grasped the straw, sucked the room temperature water gratefully, only to find himself spitting away the straw, eyes widening as the liquid seared a path of hot agony down his throat. He closed his eyes, gathered the remnants of his breath, and managed, "McKay?" in a ragged whisper that sounded far more intimate than it should.

"He's fine. Couple of minor cuts. You took the brunt of it."

John tried nodding but gave it up after the room started to dip and spin. "The men?"

"Owens caught some shrapnel in his leg, but the doc patched him up and Caldwell put him on light duty for today and tomorrow. Albano has a few chemical burns on his hands and face. The other two are fine."

"Chemicals?" John managed. It was taking everything he had not to simply surrender to the darkness that even now was starting to close in around the margins of his sight, narrowing the room first to Ronon's figure and then to just his face.

"The lab was protected by an anti-fire system that used chemical fire retardant," Ronon explained, obviously repeating someone—probably McKay—verbatim. "You sucked in a lungful when you were knocked back by the blast."

"You?" John said, finally, giving it the last of his energy.

"Fine." And the big man met John's eyes and held them, until John felt a different kind of heat spreading up from his bandaged torso, a different kind of pain in the region of his heart. Before he could reply, the creeping dark reclaimed him and he succumbed to it with the same eagerness with which he'd greeted freefall from 30,000 feet.

The next time he awoke, there was a hushed bustle, and he knew without opening his eyes that someone else had been brought in, that someone else was being doted over, cut from his clothes, spread out under the doctor's critical eyes.

John wasn't sure he wanted to know, but he couldn't lie there forever pretending sleep. He cracked open his left eye cautiously and saw Ronon once more beside him, this time wide awake, boots up on the end of the bed, eyes focused on John's face.

"Hey," he said, glad to discover that it didn't hurt as much to say it this time as it had before.

"Hey," Ronon responded.

An awkward pause that lasted at least as long as John's eighth grade crush.

Then, an audible increase in activity from the further end of the ward.

"Who is it?"

"Estevez and Brown. They were ambushed on P24-884."

"The potato planet?" John's astonishment cost him. _Note to self: don't inflect._

"Yeah. Guess the natives didn't want to give up the goods after all."

"They gonna make it?"

Ronon nodded. "Just a few puncture wounds."

"Yeah, speaking of punctures..." John trailed off. He got that the reason his throat felt like it was coated in turpentine and his lungs like he'd inhaled roofing nails was because of the chemical retardant, but he couldn't quite figure the bandages wrapped around his torso.

"You took some shrapnel. I think the word the doc used was 'peppered.'"

"Ah." A pause for consideration. Then, "And the hand?"

"You caught a piece of burning wreckage."

"And by caught you mean..."

Ronon shrugged. And maybe to everyone else it would have looked nonchalant, but to John, who knew the stoic Satedan better than either of them could afford, there was a visible line of tension in the set of the younger man's shoulders as he moved them.

"It would've hit McKay in the face. You caught it."

"While I was being blown up?" Again with the astonishment, followed quickly by blazing anguish.

Ronon shrugged again, but there was a tilt to the corners of his mouth that suggested a smile.

"Damn, I'm good."

"Or lucky."

"Right." His drawl reduced to a ragged whisper, John felt stripped of expression. After all, so much of what he meant was in the way he said things, not in the words themselves.

"You were, Sheppard."

Something in Ronon's tone gave John pause, and he looked at the man, really looked at him for the first time since he'd awoken. Ronon's eyes were steady and serious, fixed unwaveringly on John, and there was in the big man's expression an emotion John couldn't name but that made him uneasy, made him want to leave the hospital bed, flee the city, hell, find another planet altogether.

John shook his head, possible vertigo be damned. They weren't having this discussion again, not ever.

Ronon knew, of course, what that head shake meant, just as he knew that the ensuing yawn was faked and that the wan smile he received meant "Don't come back."

He stood, and John was startled again by how big Ronon was. Somehow, he always forgot how physically imposing he was, how he moved in his own kind of gravity, the kind that propelled others out of his way or made them shrink aside.

John couldn't go anywhere, tethered as he was to the hospital bed, IVs in place, lungs afire.

Ronon braced himself against either bed rail and leaned in close, shielded from the eyes of the curious by Carson's insistence on privacy screens around the whole bed.

But Ronon didn't force a kiss, as John had half expected, or say something hard and angry.

It was much worse.

The Satedan laid his beard-rough cheek against John's own day's growth of shadow, rubbing for a moment of friction before ghosting his warm breath into John's ear. The silk of his lips just tickling the delicate shell, he rumbled, "I love you," and then he was gone, before John could formulate an answer, snide or otherwise.

_Damn it._

******

Sometime in the split second between jumping to hyperspace and his creative parking job on the underbelly of the hive ship, John had the kind of epiphany that is much better saved for a rainy Sunday afternoon in bed or, say, any other time ever.

Part of John had ignored Caldwell's order on principle. They didn't leave men behind, and McKay and Ronon were trapped on that hive ship.

And partly it was arrogance. John knew he was good enough to hit the hyperdrive generator.

And the tiniest part of him was remembering all those Saturday afternoons at the boardwalk arcade, hands clenched around the controls, voice of Red Leader echoing tinnily from the crappy Sega speakers.

But the biggest part—and here's the epiphany, folks—wanted to save Ronon, wanted to rescue Ronon and, yeah, McKay, too, and whisk them away to safety and then blow that hive ship to the hereafter with a whistle and a whoo-hoo.

And that's when it hit John that he was cowboying it this time not to piss off his so-called superior nor to stick it to a hated enemy but because his lover was in dire peril—peril he, Colonel John Sheppard, had placed Ronon in when he'd sent Ronon off to keep Rodney company in case the hive deal went hinky, as they'd all suspected it might.

 _This was why you don't get involved with men under your command_ , he groused to himself, taking a moment to consider his perilous condition, perched on the hive's hull like a metallic tumor.

Soon enough, a surgeon would be along to excise him, and he had to do something heroic before then, or it all would have been for nothing. He just wasn't sure what it was that he should do that wouldn't jeopardize Ronon, Rodney, Earth, and all.

Now, doubt is the part of a fighter pilot's life that gets knocked out of him by jetwake at forty thousand feet. When you're flying wing to wing with four other crews at twice the speed of sound, you'd damned well better not hesitate, either. Hesitation kills. It was the kind of lesson they learned by searching the wreckage for body parts large enough to identify.

So in the end, John had fallen back on what he knew, and if his voice was higher and thinner than it should have been, he counted on McKay's typical self-concern to mask it.

Ironically enough, it was Michael's creepy voice cold in his ear that brought John back to himself, shook him free of the fear that had been riding him.

And obviously, it had all worked out. No one had been left behind after all, not even Michael.

*****

In the ensuing excitement of their ersatz victory, John may have forgotten a lot of things—Ronon's dangerous smile as he stalked the hallways of the hive; Rodney's routine post-beaming body check—ass, hips, head; Elizabeth's relieved voice on the comm. link when Caldwell said he had them on the bridge.

But he didn't forget the fear of loss that had frozen him for too long to the hull of the hive. And he knew that though he'd saved Ronon and escaped the Wraith this time, something had changed between them, some fundamental balance had been lost.

Truth was, John's control—over life, over love, over Ronon—was as much an illusion as the dubious humanity of the former Wraith they'd colonized on the gateless world he was supposed to be overseeing, if ever he could get out of this infirmary bed. But he couldn't share that with Ronon, couldn't risk being alone with him for even as long as it would take to recover the illusion of control by saying, "We're through."

Because, god help him, John still wanted to wrap his arms around Ronon's lean waist, bury his fingers in that wild fall of hair, suck in the scent of him until he was dizzy with it, and forget all but the feeling of what they'd had before, when the room had been theirs, when they had belonged only to each other, even if that had been an illusion, too, of safety and belonging and home.

So he'd gone on until today pretending that life was fine, not fubared, and that he was just too busy to take time out for Ronon, whose eyes had gradually become shadowed, whose looks were laden with intent hidden to all but John.

And this being the Pegasus Galaxy, where Murphy had a corner on probabilities, Ronon's intentions manifested when John least expected.

The Satedan turned up on day three, towing a beaming Beckett behind him, and said, "Get dressed" in that gruff voice that meant anything or nothing, depending on who he aimed it at.

The doctor met John's bemused expression with another smile and, "I'm releasing you to your room, so long as Ronon here keeps an eye on you. Your respiration is much improved, and there's no reason you can't heal the burns and abrasions at home as well as here."

John stared at the doctor for the time it took him to process what he was really saying. The man may as well have winked and nudged for all the subtlety in that smile.

"Get dressed," Ronon repeated, and this time there was a trace of impatience there.

Beckett moved away, whistling, of all things, and John gave Ronon a long, considering look. He wanted to say, "What have you got in mind?" but he figured the safest way was to bluff it out, pretend that nothing had changed, that John hadn't been assiduously avoiding the Satedan for several days.

Ronon handed him a pair of clean pants and a loose-fitting blue shirt of the softest material John had ever encountered. He raised an eyebrow and Ronon said, "Teyla figured it would be better over bandages than BDUs or a tee-shirt."

John nodded, not sure what to say, struck again by his own ingratitude; he hadn't talked to Teyla much since they'd survived the latest Wraith adventure, either, lumping her somewhere in the same category as Ronon—too painful to lose, too beloved to let go. When she'd been by his bed, he'd made small talk, avoided her eyes.

Obviously, she didn't hold it against him, for here he was in a shirt made painstakingly by her people.

He didn't deserve her.

Ronon helped him into his socks and boots, since he had trouble bending, trussed as he was by bandages around his chest. There wasn't as much pain as he'd expected, and he counted that among his minor blessings, since he wasn't sure he could handle Ronon on a good day, much less when he was punched full of rusty holes.

 _Well, probably not rusty_ , John amended. _The Lanteans didn't make metal that oxidized, did they?_

The internal babbling ceased when Ronon laid a warm hand on John's elbow and helped him off the bed. The floor felt spongy, making John grateful for Ronon's steadying hand even while he cursed the heat it sent up his arm, his neck, and into his face.

Ronon took it slowly, letting John set the pace, and after a few doubtful strides, the colonel said, "You can let go. I'm not going to fall."

The hand left his elbow bereft of heat and moved to hover tantalizingly over the small of John's back. He could feel Ronon's heat through the thin, soft shirt and he tried to forget what that hand felt like sliding down his naked skin. He misstepped, and Ronon caught him at the elbow again.

"Take it easy, Sheppard," Ronon rumbled easily as two Marines passed them, nodding to John as they jogged by.

Ronon said nothing, keeping a steady pressure on John's arm, moving with his usual grace at John's side. For his part, John concentrated on breathing in and out, a feat that he'd taken for granted up until a few days ago. There was still a rasping pull at the back of his throat and a gentle wheeze when he took a deep breath, but he wasn't winded by the walk, and he counted himself lucky.

Likewise, the multiple tiny punctures proved a non-issue; John could feel a tugging pressure where he moved against the bandages as he walked, but other than a mild discomfort, his chest felt okay.

Only his right hand ached, throbbing with a steady pain in time to his heartbeat.

They arrived at the transporter that would take him to the floor on which he'd find his quarters, and John said, "I'm good now. You can take off."

Ronon didn't even break stride, stepping in behind John and then standing beside him in the usual stance one took in elevators. John pondered the possibility that the elevator posture was universal and innate, and then they were on his floor. It was midday, and the corridor was deserted. He stepped confidently out of the transporter only to feel Ronon's restraining hand at his elbow.

He shrugged his shoulder sharply, ignoring the twinge of pain in his chest from the motion, and said, "I'm fine, Ronon."

Ronon's grip tightened, and John stopped, turning to face the bigger man. "I said I'm fine," he bit out, letting his irritation show.

Ronon ignored him, using the pressure at John's elbow to turn the colonel away from the direction of his quarters.

"What are you doing?" John asked, a chilling frisson of alarm racing up his spine. "My quarters are that way." He jerked his head to indicate direction.

Ronon said nothing, merely placing an implacable pressure on John's elbow until he was forced to move.

John glanced at Ronon in profile, trying to read the Satedan, but he could see nothing there except determination.

John swallowed. Mouth dry, he asked, "Where are we going?"

Again, nothing from the other man except pressure and forward motion.

"Ronon," John repeated, putting some soldier into his voice, "Tell me where you're taking us."

The bigger man stopped, and John thought, _Finally_ , and then he was being propelled with something less than gentleness into a small, dark room perhaps half the size of his quarters. It was an interior space, lacking windows, but the colorful panels that passed for lights gave a muted glow on John's precipitous entrance.

John turned to face Ronon as the other man stepped into the room, ran his large hand over the inner door mechanism, and growled something, some word or phrase, in Satedan. The door pinged once in a way that John had never heard, and a cold certainty wrapped itself around his heart and squeezed.

"What are you doing, Ronon?"

"You've been avoiding me." Direct. No preamble.

John tried for light, "And you thought, what—a little abduction before lunch was the solution? I know you haven't been with us that long, Ronon, but we earth types don't usually—"

"Shut up," Ronon said. It wasn't the words themselves, bald though they were, but the tone of quiet command, that made John stutter to a halt, made him look—really look—at the man who'd been, until recently, his lover.

Ronon's eyes were shuttered; whatever emotion was there was being held in check, and John felt that coldness around his heart constrict.

"What is this?" he said, his own voice barely above a hoarse whisper.

Ronon moved toward him, and John took a step back, John who had never backed down from a fight, who had made an art form of refusing to submit, who had stared a Wraith queen in the eye and flown his ship into the maelstrom time and time again.

Another step and John felt his hips bump against something—a console, maybe—that stopped him. He slid to the left and felt a wall hard against his back.

Ronon kept coming.

"Ronon," John warned with his voice, warned with his hands, up in front of him now in a defensive posture. He wished he had his P-90 and then dismissed the thought, knowing that he could never shoot Ronon, regardless of the other man's intentions.

Those intentions were telegraphed as Ronon stepped against the trapped John, his tight belly, lean thighs, hard shaft, pressed and held intimately to John's own. Not long ago, this would have been hotter than hell. Not long ago, John would have submitted with a manly whimper.

"Ronon," he said again, and then cleared his throat as his voice cracked. "Ronon, what's going on?"

"C'mon, Sheppard. You're a big boy. You know what we're doing here."

John shook his head. "No, I don't." His tone made it clear: step back, soldier.

"You've been avoiding me," he said again. He brought his arms up to bracket John's shoulders. John could duck under and away, but it wouldn't be graceful and it sure as hell would send the wrong impression, that John was retreating, that he was afraid.

 _But you are afraid_ , a voice whispered insidiously, and he shook his head even as he said,

"No, I haven't." They both heard the hollowness in the lie.

"Yes, you have." Hot breath ghosted across John's ear as Ronon did a kind of vertical push-up so that their chests just touched.

"Get off of me," John said, voice shaking, composure blown all to hell by Ronon's proximity and the panic clutching his chest in its vicious grip.

Ronon eased back but did not let John go. "Talk to me, John," he said.

"Step away, Ronon," John commanded, but his voice was high and thready with need and with something else, something like fear.

Ronon's eyes darkened where they held John's own, and John swallowed, feeling a flush of heat rush up from his belly. Ronon was a predator and John had given him his fear, and now the big man looked like he would devour John down in one long swallow.

"Tell me what you want, John," Ronon whispered, voice rough with need and promise.

John shook his head, unable to speak, unable to say what he needed. Control—release—hope—an end to the terror clawing at his gut, driving the breath from him.

"Let me go," he finally managed, and there was more pleading than demand there.

"No." Definite. Ronon leaned in again.

"Ronon, please," and John remembered crying out those words as his world burned.

Lips slid smoothly along his eyelid, his cheekbone, down the slope of his jaw.

"It will be rape," he tried, voice strangled by conflicting emotions—need and fear, desire and panic.

Ronon stopped, pushing away to the length of his long arms, giving John room to breathe.

He waited until John looked up at him, and then he said, "Tell me to stop."

John shook his head, unable to speak, to articulate what he wanted, what he was feeling. Stop didn't begin to cover it, nor did "Don't stop," and he wasn't sure that there were words for any of what he felt, but then it didn't matter, because Ronon had leaned in again and was biting down on the thin skin of his neck where it stretched over the blue of his carotid, and John was arching beneath him, crying out wordlessly and pressing himself to Ronon.

Everywhere he touched with his bandaged right hand burned him, as though Ronon's flesh were fire, but John didn't care, couldn't care.

The big man worked at John's pants, popping the button with one hand while laving a line of heat down John's throat to his chest just above the white bandages.

"Oh, god, Ronon," John moaned, throwing his head back to give the man his throat, surrendering utterly to the annihilation of Ronon's heat.

A big hand wrapped hotly around his shaft and John moaned again, a high and desperate sound, and thrust forward mindlessly into that enveloping touch.

Ronon growled, "Sheppard" into John's ear and then abandoned his stroking to wrench John's pants down roughly and spin him hard around. John caught himself on the wall, hissing as his burned hand took the brunt of the move, a sound that changed to a whine as Ronon ran his hard length against John's crease.

He felt fingers probing his opening, felt them slide in hard and rough, without lubricant, and Ronon paused to press himself to John's back, his skin hot through the two layers of shirt between them.

"Relax," Ronon growled, and John nodded raggedly, panting from the pain and then from the bursting pleasure as Ronon struck the spot and smoothed his fingers over it again and then again.

John threw his head back against Ronon's straining shoulder and pushed back onto the questing fingers, whimpering now in time to Ronon's demanding thrusts.

Ronon's other hand reached up to cup John's cheek, seeking, and John opened his mouth to suckle Ronon's thumb. The rhythm of Ronon's clever fingers stuttered, and the big man groaned low in his throat, a deep sound that made John suck harder and then lick the breadth of the big man's palm, tasting salt and skin and the man himself.

Then the hand was gone, the fingers wrenched free, and John whimpered with what came next, feeling the blunt pressure of Ronon against his hole and then the stretching pain of it and then a searing fullness that drove his breath from his body, drove him against the wall and up onto his toes.

Ronon rived him as John screamed, a high, ragged shout of letting go and then a series of wordless sounds in time with Ronon's movements. The big man wrapped his arm around John's waist and pulled him back more firmly onto his shaft, seating the smaller man until John thought he might be split down the center, and then he didn't care, for there was a hot hand around his own aching member and Ronon's hoarse voice hot in his ear, and John was whining as the world was reduced to the heat in his center spreading upward from the core and the sweaty slide of Ronon's powerful body against his own.

John felt the fire flare, felt Ronon's rhythm grow erratic as his breath stuttered and caught against John's sweat-slick cheek, felt him tighten his hand around John's thrusting, and then John came apart with a cry, "I love you, god, Ronon, I love you, I love you, I love you" and then he was sobbing in Ronon's arms even as the big man gave a final thrust, a deep groan of completion, and tightened his hold on the sagging John.

Ronon sheltered John with his curved back, and then stood up, bringing John with him, both arms now wrapped around the shaking man whose choked breaths echoed in the suddenly still room.

 

"Easy," Ronon soothed, running one hand down John's chest in a gesture of comfort. "Easy," he said again, gentling John as he might a panicked horse.

John's breath came ragged but steadied and he raised his head to rest it against Ronon's chest.

Ronon leaned down to brush a kiss across John's ear and rumbled, "Okay?" John's nodding head bounced gently against him in affirmation.

Ronon turned him, bracing them both against the wall.

John looked up at Ronon and saw mirrored there the same rawness he felt his own must hold.

"God, Ronon," he said, and his voice was all gravel and broken glass.

"Yeah," Ronon, voice a rough echo.

John took a shuddering breath and raised his good hand to rest it against Ronon's chest, just over his heart, which beat strong and steady, counterpoint to John's own, which pulsed in his palm, too.

"We can't—"he started, but he wasn't sure what came next, and it didn't matter, for Ronon said,

"I know."

"It's too much, Ronon." John felt his heart skip in place, felt Ronon tense beneath his hand.

"No," the big man said, "It's not enough."

John nodded, tightening his jaw and staring hard at the floor beneath their feet. He moved his hand away and squared himself, starting to bend, to force Ronon back so that he could pull up his pants. Of course, he was stopped by the unyielding bandage wrapped around him like a brace, and he cursed fluently, cheeks hot with shame at his own helplessness.

Ronon dealt with his own dishabille and then knelt wordlessly, hair tickling softly at John's belly and flaccid shaft, and righted John's pants, pulled them up, smoothed them out so that John could fasten them at fly and button.

Ronon didn't rise but stayed kneeling, and John reached out with his bandaged hand to pull Ronon against him, feeling his beard rough through the thin, soft material of the borrowed shirt, which in their desperate haste had never been undone. Ronon's voice was muffled when he said, "I love you" and then clearer as he pulled out of John's gentle grip. "But I won't push again."

He stood, and John followed his face up with his eyes, until Ronon was looking down at him, on his young and handsome face an expression John had hoped never to see—a hurt he himself had caused.

"I won't ask," John said. "I can't."

Ronon nodded. "I know."

"Then we go on as we did before," John made it a question. Before they'd loved and laid each other open; before he'd left without going anywhere at all.

"Is there another way?" And maybe there was hope hidden in Ronon's otherwise indifferent tone.

"No." A small syllable to hold so much hurt.

Ronon's nod was curt, jerky, his hand hot where it wrapped around John's elbow.

"Let's go," he said, moving them toward the door.

"I can make it on my own," John said, resisting.

Ronon let go. At the door, he stopped, muttered the same Satedan words he'd used before, and waved a hand over the door's sensors. Another ping, and the door slid wide.

"What did you say?" John asked, delaying the inevitable parting.

Ronon repeated the guttural words and then translated them. "It means, 'hope is the last harbor.'"

John's throat closed and he cleared it noisily. Moving past Ronon, he said, "I'll let Beckett know I'm on my own."

"Right."

The door slid closed behind the retreating figures, moving in opposite directions. Only hope would open it again.

  
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.wraithbait.com/viewstory.php?sid=8163>  



	2. Abandon Hope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To stay in canon as much as possible, I went on the assumption that the antidote for Luvin's pheromone potion allows people to break from his sway but that they still suffer a type of withdrawal as their neurochemicals readjust after-the-fact. So there.

The irony is thick in John’s throat as he stands just inside the door of Ronon’s quarters watching the big man shake himself apart on the narrow Lantean bed.

A few weeks ago—hell, a few days, really—either of them would have killed for an excuse to be together in his bedroom in the middle of the day. 

Now that he had that excuse—Ronon’s withdrawal playing out before him in painful, slow steps—John couldn’t— _wouldn’_ t, he corrected internally—touch him. Not even to hold back the heavy dreads that fell in waves around his sweating face. Not even to rub an absentminded hand over the big man’s shoulders as he heaved for the umpteenth time. 

Because John was being good.

_Yeah, right. John is being a fucking coward,_ he thought, cradling the zat closer to his chest as Ronon dragged himself upward from the wrecked bed and toward the tiny commode off to John’s right. 

Ronon stumbled in a half-step, all grace gone, and John started to reach out toward him, stopping himself just before his hand could make contact with the man’s body. Ronon grunted under his breath—disgust, maybe, or just discomfort—and righted himself, making a lunge toward the basin just as another round of retching brought up whatever was left in his stomach.

_Couldn’t be much,_ John thought sympathetically, observing the man’s struggle to control the heaving. He’d been like this for a long time. 

John spared a glance at his watch: fifteen hours. 

Of course, John hadn’t been on duty that whole time, at least not in Ronon’s room. He and Carson had had their hands full trying to give aid to the worst-affected of the expedition who had fallen under Luvin’s loving potion. An image came to him then of Elizabeth, neat hair a wild, wet mess around her too-pale face, hands shaking, whine coming up her throat from somewhere deep down that John didn’t care to think about.

“Please, John,” she’d moaned. “Please. I need to see him.” She’d fisted her hands in his vest, and he’d had to wrench her away, all gentleness lost in the face of her abandon. She’d tried wheedling, next, and then bargaining, none of which swayed him from his stoic resolve.

Seduction had been the worst. He’d turned away from the naked need in her eyes, fled the room, locked the door behind him, and stationed a thin, dark Marine too new to Atlantis for John to know well—Esposito, maybe, or Esposa, something with an E. “Stay on the door. You don’t go in. She doesn’t come out. When Doctor Beckett arrives, let him in and lock the door behind him, got it?” The man had given him a sharp nod and a “Sir, yes sir!”—definitely new, then…none of the veteran marines bothered with that formal shit anymore.

He shivered a little, listening to Ronon gasping in the narrow room next to him. 

“You okay, buddy?” John said, trying for friendly.

“Fuck you,” Ronon replied, voice a raw ruin, heavy on the rasping.

“Hey, now, c’mon. You’re doing great. Pretty soon, you’ll be racing circles around me again.”  
Ronon gave John a hard look via the mirror over the sink. 

“Fuck you,” he said again, succinctly.

John shifted a little, tightening his grip on the zat imperceptibly. He decided that silence might not be golden, but it was probably as good as he was going to get in this situation.

Ronon retreated from the bathroom, making no pretense of avoiding John, in fact leaning into him with his shoulder as he brushed past, pushing John off-balance and into the locked door at his back. Before John could right himself, Ronon was there, pinning him, zat still in his right hand and trapped between the big man’s and John’s own chest. Ronon’s left hand snaked around the back of John’s neck.

John’s left hand was still free, and with it, he reached carefully toward his left hip and the knife he kept there. He didn’t really want to have to stab Ronon. It wasn’t Ronon’s fault that he was behaving like this; Luvin’s little recipe proved to have devastating psychoactive effects on those who had been longest exposed to it, as Elizabeth had surely proven. 

John kicked himself for not being more careful around the Satedan. It was his own guilt that had put him in the room to begin with, and it was that same guilt that had made him dismiss the threat of his former lover.

“Ronon,” John warned, keeping his voice level, his eyes steady on the other man’s. 

“John,” he growled, breath washing over John in a sour cloud. 

“Brushing your teeth might be a good idea, big guy,” John said casually, trying to shift enough to free the zat without blasting himself at the same time. 

Ronon ignored him, leaning in, nipping John hard on the cheek. The pain was swift and distinct, and John couldn’t help the surprised yelp that left him. It hadn’t been a love-bite.

“Hey!” he said, trying more overtly to use the zat. Wrapping his free hand in Ronon’s hair, John pulled the bigger man’s head away, at the same time shifting one leg to knock Ronon’s feet apart. 

But he didn’t have the leverage to put any weight behind it, and the hair-pulling seemed only to anger the Satedan, who growled again and leaned into John with his pelvis, thrusting in a way that left no room for misinterpretation.

Ronon’s hard length ground uncomfortably against John, driving John’s zipper into his own not-uninterested shaft, and John bucked against the motion, realizing too late that that might seem like some kind of encouragement.

“Ronon, get off of me,” he said. The vivid memory of the last time Ronon had been like this flashed through his head and he closed his eyes against it, feeling for purchase deeper in Ronon’s thick hair. 

He tugged hard, pulling Ronon’s head back, and then released him suddenly, butting his head forward at the same time, letting Ronon’s own recoil add to the momentum of the move. His forehead caught the taller man on the chin and lower lip, and Ronon grunted and fell backward.

John used the motion to move on Ronon, taking him down with a swift sweep, pinning him while he was still recovering from the headbutt, and securing his wrists with plastic restraints. There was a rivulet of blood trailing down Ronon’s chin from his split lip, which was already swelling.

“I’m sorry,” John whispered roughly, feeling like shit. “Let’s get you back to bed, and then I’ll clean up that cut, okay?”

Ronon gave him a baleful look and said nothing.

After he’d levered Ronon’s dead weight—the big man wasn’t helping John any—onto the bed and cleaned the blood from Ronon’s face and neck, John pulled up a chair, spun it about, and sat with the safety of its hard back between his crotch and Ronon’s dark gaze.

“I’m sorry,” John said again, giving Ronon a pale imitation of his usual charming smile.

Ronon turned his eyes away, and John felt strangely bereft of their weight of accusation. He didn’t have long to feel that way, however, because Ronon’s head snapped around with an almost audible speed and he growled—actually growled, like some big fucking predator—and said, in a voice dragged through broken glass—“You owe me, Sheppard.”

John knew it was the drug talking, knew that Ronon was working through some things on his own, as well, and that he shouldn’t listen to his former lover. So he tried to ignore him.

“I gave you everything,” the man hissed, and John couldn’t help the shiver of dread that trailed up his spine at the hatred lacing Ronon’s voice.

“Ronon,” John soothed, reaching out a hand that he was ashamed to find shaking. 

“Don’t,” the big man barked, and John halted, hand still outstretched. “I’m his, not yours. You gave me up.”

Swallowing in the suddenly thick air, John pulled his hand back as though Ronon had bitten him. His heart felt cold and heavy, like it was beating against encroaching ice, and he wanted to close his eyes against the pain of it. Instead, he rocked his head slowly to one side and then the other, trying to loosen suddenly rigid muscles, trying to dodge the inevitable evidence of his failure.

“I didn’t—“ he started, then faltered. Because Ronon had a point, after all. John had walked away, called it quits, hung up his spurs. _Unfortunate image_ , John thought, just as Ronon roared and bucked on the bed, neck muscles corded with the effort to break free of the restraints binding his wrists.

“Ronon!” John shouted, standing up so suddenly that the chair beneath him tipped over toward the bed. John hurdled it, threw himself over Ronon’s struggling form, felt the man still to stone beneath him, heard the harsh pants of labored breathing and then, hoarse and broken, “Get off me. I’m his. I’m his. I’m his.”

Hands bracketing Ronon’s head, one knee between Ronon’s two, John levered himself up and looked down into Ronon’s face. His eyes were tightly closed, twin trails of tears tracing their way down toward his hairline to either side. His lower lip trembled, and as John watched, he bit it to keep it still, and his throat convulsed once, twice…

John said, “Ronon,” or maybe he only thought it, and then his hand came up to wipe away the tears. “It’s okay. It’s just the drug. You’ll feel better in the morning.”

Ronon’s head shook side to side, dreads brushing John’s bracing hand.

“No, it won’t,” he answered, voice a bare whisper. “It won’t be okay.”

“Yes, it will,” John insisted, easing back to sit on the side of the bed, suddenly too aware of the intimacy of his position.

“No,” Ronon whispered again, opening his eyes. What John saw there made the colonel flinch, made him want to close his own against it. 

Pain, the kind that comes with a special type of betrayal. A hurt so insidious that it eats away at a man from the inside out, leaving a perfectly functional replica, a mockery of a man, for the world to see.

“He left me,” Ronon said. 

_He’s talking about Luvin_ , John told himself. Himself told John to fuck off. John’s head dropped, and he finally closed his eyes.

“He had to go, Ronon. He didn’t belong…” John took a deep breath, regrouped, opened his eyes. “He couldn’t stay with you. It was too…” But John couldn’t say it, knew he didn’t have to, knew it wouldn’t make a bit of difference. There were no new words for balm; the wounds were too raw, still.

“I wish he’d never come here,” Ronon whispered, and John’s heart stuttered and froze. He couldn’t hear this. He didn’t think it could hurt so much to breathe, and he had to remind himself that exhale came after in.

Ronon didn’t deserve this. John knew some of it was the drug talking, but a good part of it was John’s own fault. 

He remembered, all at once, Ronon laughing, head thrown back in utter abandon. He remembered how his breath had caught in his throat to see Ronon in beautiful abandonment, laughing like the boy he might have been before Kell betrayed him. For long, hot minutes, John had been so jealous he had thought that he might kill the baking bastard where he sat, might rip those laughing lips from his unctuous face. But anger had been replaced in short order by sorrow: sorrow that Ronon didn’t laugh like that more often. Sadness that Ronon’s youth had been lost to the Wraith. Grief that John had given up that look of love that shone now from Ronon’s happy face, beaming at Luvin as he launched into yet another of his damned stories.

“I’m sorry,” he said now, for what must have been the billionth worthless time. “I’m so sorry, Ronon.”

“Save it, Sheppard,” Ronon slurred, just before slipping into unconsciousness. 

John reached to his comm. link and summoned Carson. If his voice sounded desperate, he found that he didn’t give a fuck who heard it.

*****  
The warmth of the morning sun woke John from his drowsing, and he cracked his eyes open carefully to see a bright beam blanketing Ronon’s still-sleeping form.

John rose stiffly, walked to the bathroom, took care of his morning ablutions, and returned to find Ronon watching him. 

Color had returned to him during the night, while he slept through the last of the shakes. Carson had given him an intravenous drip, something to help the dehydration that heaving had brought, and told John that the Satedan would be fine. Then the doc had tried to get John to go home. 

Right.

“Hey,” John said softly. Neutral.

“Hey,” Ronon croaked and then coughed. John offered him the water he’d kept by the bed through the long hours before dawn.

“Thanks,” he said, sounding better. Then, raising his wrists, he added, “You gonna get these things off me now?”

John narrowed his eyes, searched Ronon’s face, then shrugged. If he got clocked, he figured he deserved it, anyway.

“Thanks,” Ronon said again, sitting up slowly, levering his legs over the edge of the bed and standing on unsteady legs.

John offered him a hand, which Ronon shrugged off with a clipped, “I’m fine, Sheppard. Go home.” He shuffled into the bathroom and shut the door. The shower came on, and John settled in.

A wet towel woke him from his doze, and he startled, nearly falling backward in the chair. He looked up to find Ronon leaning in the doorway to the bathroom, dwarfing the tiny space with his sheer size. 

“What do you want, Sheppard?” he asked, voice hard.

“I want us to be okay,” John said, knowing that it was a stupid, selfish request. How could they ever be okay?

Ronon’s shrug was answer enough.

“That’s not an answer, and you know it,” John said, standing up and shoving the chair back. “You said some things last night, Ronon—“

“It was the drug talking,” Ronon asserted, giving John a long look, as if challenging him to call Ronon on the lie they both heard there.

“Thing is, you were right,” John went on, ignoring Ronon’s glowering. “I did give you up. I did walk away. Hell, I ran,” John said, the bitterness sharp on his tongue. “I’m sorry, Ronon. Sorry I couldn’t be stronger for you, for us. Sorry I couldn’t stand to see you suffer, couldn’t risk being the one who sent you to your death. Not again. Not when I’d finally found…”

John stopped, shook his head as if to drive away the feelings that were crowding his heart and making his belly heavy with fear.

“Found what, Sheppard? A fuck buddy? That’s what you call someone like me back on earth, right?” 

John spared a thought for how Ronon had learned the term and then said, emphatically, “No! No, Ronon, that’s not what you were. You know that!”

“Do I?” And there was a quality to Ronon’s voice that reminded John, once again, of a little boy, only this one was abandoned in a different way, not to laughter but to loneliness.

“I love you, Ronon,” John somehow said around the choking in his throat. “I still-- I will always love you. You can’t think…please don’t think that I don’t love you.” 

“Then what is your problem, Sheppard?” And the heat of Ronon’s anger shocked John, which was ridiculous, because the one emotion the big man allowed himself was anger, and John knew how good the Satedan could be at it. 

“Ronon, we’ve been through this,” John said, glancing back over his shoulder to find an escape route. Since Ronon was between him and the door, there was none, not unless John could find a way through the window and survive the long drop to the deck below. It was probably safer to stay in the room. 

Probably.

Ronon’s hand landed on John’s neck at about the same time that he realized the bigger man had moved. John found himself pulled into a rough kiss, found that his forward momentum brought him hard up against Ronon’s bare chest, which was still damp with the shower and hot with residual fever from the long night.

He brought his hands up to stop Ronon, to shove him back and away, but instead they snaked around Ronon’s neck and into his hair. He fisted his hands to feel the weight of all that heavy hair and leaned deeper into the kiss. Ronon’s tongue was hot in his mouth, filling him, and John moaned and felt Ronon’s erection against his belly, through his shirt. He moaned again, and came up flush against he bigger man, insinuating a knee between Ronon’s spread thighs, which earned him a moan in return.

They broke away, breathless, and Ronon pushed John backward to the bed, bending down to unzip John’s pants, unlace his boots, even as the towel that had been his only concession to modesty fell away to reveal his own long shaft, red and ready, tip weeping.

It was going to be fast and hard, John knew, and he didn’t care. His pants were around his ankles when Ronon growled and gave up, shoving John hard back onto the bed, rucking John’s shirt up around his neck and biting viciously at one pebbled nipple. 

John’s scream was swallowed in a searing kiss, and then Ronon was driving between John’s thighs, shaft against shaft in an exquisitely painful rhythm. John shouted up into Ronon’s neck, bit the corded muscle along his collarbone, heard Ronon’s answering shout, and then it was all lightning and lava as they came and came and came.

Eons later, after the shifting of the tides, after their breathing slowed and they came to themselves, Ronon pushed up and over John, looking down into his eyes.

“This okay?” he asked, and John laughed. 

“It’s a little late for asking,” he observed.

Ronon shrugged as best he could, given his position. “Didn’t hear you complaining.”

“No…” John said. “No, you didn’t.”

Ronon rolled to one side, ran his hand through the mess on John’s belly, threw a thigh over John to pin him in place. Something sweet and hot curled through the colonel, and he canted his head to look at Ronon.

“So…did you do this with Luvin?” 

Ronon levered himself up to look down at John.

“What do you think?”

John thought he might vomit.

“Ronon,” he managed, throat so tight with mingled emotions—jealousy, love, fear, pain, hope—he wasn’t sure he could say anything else.

“No,” Ronon said simply, staring steadily into John’s suddenly too-bright eyes. 

John blinked, brought Ronon back into focus. “Good,” he said, the word shaky on a breath suddenly exhaled after long holding.

“Gave him a blowjob, though,” Ronon added, a mischievous glint in his eye.

“Did you?” John asked, playing along.

“Yeah…turns out his come makes me irresistible, too.” 

“Really?” John drawled, smirking. “That why I’m in bed with you today?”

“Naw…the magic spooge wore off hours ago. You’re in bed with me because you’re easy.”

John missed the beat, too busy cataloging all of the words that the marines were no longer allowed to use around alien personnel, and finally recovered, but weakly.

“Am not!”

“Are to,” Ronon countered. 

“Am not!” 

“Are to,” Ronon insisted, punctuating his words with a hard kiss, which effectively silenced John’s protest by proving Ronon’s point.  
“Okay…so maybe I am. Guess it’s a lucky thing I was here this morning, then, huh?”

“Yes,” Ronon said, suddenly serious.

“Hey…” John began.

But Ronon just shook his head. “Not now.”

“But soon,” John insisted.

Ronon smiled. 

“I—“ John started.

“I know,” Ronon finished. “Me, too.” 

“I wouldn’t be easy for anyone but you,” John said as Ronon’s hand came up to cup his cheek, where the bite-shaped bruise darkened and swelled.

“There’s nothing easy about us,” Ronon observed, leaning down to chase the bitterness of his words with a kiss.

When it ended, John breathed, “At least our stories will be better than his.”

Ronon laughed, and John found that it was infectious, irresistible, and all for him.

His last coherent thought was _good thing they can’t bottle **this** stuff._

********FIN**********


	3. Its Own Place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This piece is an episode tag for 3.05, _Progeny_ , and is spoiler-heavy for 3.04, _Sateda_ , as well. I start from the assumption that the Asurans torture our intrepid heroes more than the one occasion that we see in the episode itself.
> 
> The title for my tale comes from Book I, lines 253-4 of John Milton's _Paradise Lost_ :  
>  _The mind is its own place, and in itself_  
>  Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Breath steady, he centered himself, feeling the cool mat beneath his bare feet, feeling the weight of the air on his shoulders, the brush of his shirt against his stomach as he inhaled slowly, controlled.

He waited, watching.

Ronon was circling with that slow, predatory grace that always made John feel hunted and hungry both, the kind of contradiction that gets guys killed, he might have reflected.

As it was, he did not. It didn't pay to let his mind move past the moment between inhale and exhale, between breath and breath.

Ronon moved and John waited, which was an ironic inversion of their relationship outside the room.

When the strike came, it was expected but still surprising, the flex of Ronon's muscles in the seconds before he struck a kind of tell John had learned to read but had not yet learned to entirely counter.

He stepped around his center, the perfect pivot, and drove Ronon away, open-handed, wet slaps against Ronon's sweaty back propelling him across the room.

Ronon barked out a rough laugh, spun, came at John again.

John dropped beneath Ronon's reach, taking the weight on his hands, scissoring his feet to sweep Ronon's out from beneath him.

Ronon rolled when he hit the mat, but John was on him before he could get his feet beneath him. Hard forearm across Ronon's throat, other hand braced behind it in a move that was illegal in his other galaxy, John growled into the Satedan's ear, "Stay down, damnit," and tightened the chokehold, feeling that delicate apple stutter against his wrist as Ronon let out a guttural word that might have been English.

Ronon bucked up against John's weight, making him grunt and shift. "I said stay down," he muttered, smelling Ronon's sweat, the familiar tang of it sharp in his nostrils. His heavy hair, bound back, tickled John's face, prickly in his own melting sweat.

Ronon relaxed, but John didn't buy it, and he kept his grip, riding Ronon into the mat, thighs tight to his hips, knees on the backs of his arms.

It should have been a surrender.

"We done?" John asked, voice low, strained with the effort of keeping his grip and his seat on the big man's broad back.

Something muffled, and John eased up, letting Ronon breathe a little, easing his arm away from Ronon's throat and levering himself off of his arms.

He took a step back, watched as Ronon rose on all fours.

"You okay?" John asked.

Head down, he swiveled, gave John a long look and then grinned.

John took another step back.

Ronon rose from the mat in an explosion of motion, and John backpeddled in the face of Ronon's ferocity, his feral grin stretching his face until he was unfamiliar.

John's hands were up in the universal sign of capitulation, and he was saying, "Hey, easy now," even as Ronon rushed him. He had a half a second to consider escape and then Ronon was there, propelling John backward into the wall with a crushing thud that expelled John's breath with a gusty groan and drove the strength from his bones.

He would have slid down the wall except for Ronon's bracing arm, which held him at the shoulders, pinned and gasping.

Ronon kicked John's feet wide and drove his knee between them, hard up against John's groin, and he might have groaned except that he still couldn't breathe. He gave a feeble shake of his head, to say no or to clear the encroaching darkness from the edges of his eyes, even he didn't know.

He was drowning, throat closed, pain radiating up from his wrecked ribs, sweat stinging his eyes, precious breath a shallow trickle.

Ronon stole the last of it as he dove in for a searing kiss that sucked the blackness inward and swallowed John whole.

 _He was in the ruin of "their" room, which was charred and gutted, crystals ground to powder under their intruding feet, wire entrails dripping from the burst ceiling panels. Nothing remained of the central console except a suggestion of sigils in two broken columns that rose from the floor like accusing fingers._  
Behind him, the door was a warped exclamation point, jammed half-open. "Can't come back here," John whispered, half to himself, half to the city, whose hum was hindered here.

"There's nothing here, Sheppard," Ronon's rough voice said. He blocked the light filtering in from the hallway behind him, plunged the room into points of light picked out by John's feeble flashlight, which was dimming by the minute.

"I know," John said, facing the big man, who was advancing like a glacier, all size and slow destruction.

"Nothing," Ronon repeated as his bulk filled John's vision before it went altogether black.

John was breathing hard, fear a living thing in the back of his throat as he considered the odds. Someone had once said that courage comes not from a lack of fear but from the willingness to fight despite it. Obviously, that someone had never been pursued by a pack of space vampires bent on absolute annihilation of all human life. John was scared. Scared that he wouldn't keep ahead of the wraith who hounded him, scared that he would be too late to save Ronon, scared that he'd never find out what this building had been, if Ronon had been there before, what kind of people worked or lived here, what they meant to the man who had been his lover for months now.

Fear was driven away by despair when he and Teyla burst into the room at the end of that eternal corridor and he saw Ronon against the far wall. The Satedan was bloody, still, sitting where he'd been broken, in a pool of blood, and John sucked in a breath, swallowing back bile, willing himself to walk to where his lover slumped.

In the dim light that filtered through the filthy, broken windows and the dust-addled air, John caught a glint of eyes and then of gritted, grinning teeth, and then, over his own shuddering breath, the sound of Ronon's greeting.

_In the ruin of their room, Ronon is rigid with remembering, and John is calling his name again and again, saying, "Ronon, we gotta go. Ronon!"_

But Ronon cannot hear John. John can see in the glassy absence in Ronon's eyes, in the way his chest rises and falls far too rapidly, that Ronon is watching something else, something that isn't there in the room with John at all.

Something ragged spools from Ronon's lips, a repetitive whisper, like a mantra, and as he nears the man, he hears it clearly, "Melena, Melena, Melena."

John notices movement then, as Ronon's hands clench and tighten the tourniquet, name spread thick on blood-sharp air, the only sound except for Teyla's repeated admonitions that they must go, that they have to take the high ground, get out of this dead-end room.

 _Dead room. Room of the dead._ And quick as he thinks it, Ronon says it, "They're all dead. There's nothing here, Sheppard," and he's rising himself like death, all gore and the graphic promise of violence to come in the way he grips his gun, and John is backing away from the apocalyptic shadows that walk with Ronon now.

"I know," John tries to say, but nothing comes, and then Ronon is past him, and he's swept by the breath of annihilation as the ghost of a blast breaks the wall behind him.

He's holding his breath when the wraith throws Ronon across the courtyard, but he sucks it sharp through his teeth when Ronon hits, winces as the big man slides to the ground, clearly stunned, and then staggers back up.

Banter is out of the question, but he tries, querying Teyla about how serious Ronon's threat really was, and when he hears the worry in her voice, he cannot help but close his eyes against it. Is he really going to sit here and let Ronon die over some stupid point of pride?

The wraith is making play with Ronon, tossing him around with a wicked grin on his ghastly face, and John wants to shout, to draw the wraith's attention, to draw his fire—anything but watch him advance on the weary Ronon, who wears his wounds like a banner advertising defeat.

As Ronon goes down again, for the third or fourth or four hundredth time, John starts to target the wraith, and only Teyla's firm hand on his arm stops him. She shakes her head, nods toward the courtyard, and John sees that Ronon is on his feet, is giving back to the wraith some of the pain he's been dealing.

And Ronon's smiling, the wild, wide manic grin that John knows so well. The wraith staggers, stumbles, but does not stop coming at Ronon, whose exhaustion is visible from the distance of John's perch, shoulders heaving with breathing. The thigh of Ronon's pants is dark with blood, and John squints against the dusty yellow wash of light to see if he can actually watch Ronon's life seep away from him.

He shudders and starts once again to raise the gun. He cannot watch his lover die, no matter that the name on Ronon's lips is not his own, no matter that there is history here that is not John's to relive nor to give back to the man below him.

But before John can betray the promise he had made, the jumper appears, wash waking the dust into dervishes as Ronon whoops and drones dive in violent light toward their target.

_He is in a tight, cold place, darkness a crushing weight, robbing him of air, and the movement of a nearby body does nothing to silence the whimpers only he can hear echoing inside of his head. He won't make a sound, and the darkness will stop breathing over him in a way that suggests sentience and implies insidious intention._

John's breathing speeds as he hugs the wall, fingers spidering over the cold cracks to find any egress—door or window, ways out that he hasn't thought of, anything but the possibility of dying in the dark, or worse, sharing it with the person he's sure is there, just out of reach.

When he comes up against a solid body, he is not surprised, but he lets out the softest sigh of fear, involuntary, and the shape shifts beneath his hand and laughs.

Ronon's breath heats John's lips in the moment before the bruising kiss begins, and John wants to squirm away, but there is no room. Hands hard on his wrists hold him pinned in place, kneeling on the unforgiving stone, off-balance and spinning out over space.

He is sweating when Ronon releases him and swearing when Ronon circles both wrists with one big hand and works the other between them.

"No!" he shouts—or tries to shout—but his voice is constricted to a moan that might be misconstrued, and as he works his throat he feels teeth against that tenderest of flesh and he sucks in a choking breath just before his jugular goes.

"There's nothing there," Ronon laughs, lips wet with John's blood.

"I know," John tries to say, but there is only the breathing.

He breathes in deeply, snuffling up out of sleep, and catches the familiar scents of the infirmary. How'd he get here?

Cracking one eye carefully open—long experience with Beckett has taught him not to let on he's awake until he's ready for a penlight in the eye—he spies a shape looming over him. He shuts his eye hastily but hears the inhale that comes just before the word.

"Hey." Ronon.

"What happened?" he manages, before the dryness in his throat crawls into a cough. Then there's the obligatory cup with the silly straw that always makes him feel five years old. And then there's Beckett and the penlight and more fussing than any injury really warrants.

"I'm fine," he says for the one billionth time, and finally he's alone with Ronon again, behind the now-standard privacy curtain.

"Sparring accident?" he drawls, raising one eyebrow skeptically. "They bought that?"

Ronon shrugs. "Guess they figured my first explanation wasn't good enough. You know, that I tried to strangle my superior officer."

John nods. "Yeah, well. Who'd believe that about you?"

Out of the corner of his eye, John spies Kell, whom he's never seen but recognizes instantly. He stiffens, and Ronon turns to look behind him.

Can't Ronon see the pale-faced specter, the corpse of his Pateras, looming over his shoulder like judgment?

John's eyes have gone wide, his breath shallow.

"There's nothing there," Ronon says, turning back with a quizzical look, and John shakes his head as the dead hand comes for his throat.

_He breathes in sharply at the pain spiking through his head, opens his eyes in time to see the Asuran step back with a frown._

Rolling away, trying to get up, John sees the others similarly incapacitated, only Ronon rising to his feet. The interrogator is out the door before the big man can make a move.

"You okay?" he says to John as he moves across the room, shaking their teammates into groaning wakefulness.

"Yeah," John says. "You?"

Ronon's shrug is enough.

Ronon helps him sit up against the wall, goes back to the others to do likewise, and soon they are all sitting, staring at the far side of the cell, each lost in thoughts too ugly and intimate to share.

Ronon has chosen to sit beside John, and he leans over to say, voice low and tense, "Did they get anything out of you?"

The brush of Ronon's breath against the shell of his ear makes John shudder, and he shrugs the man away from him, unsure and unwilling to show it.

He means to say, "I don't know," but instead he says, "Melena," and Ronon freezes.

"What did you say?"

"You heard me. Who is she, Ronon?"

"Was," Ronon says roughly, and the mere inflection is a warning.

"Okay," John says, in his patient, patronizing voice, "Who was she, then? Who was Melena, Ronon?"

"Let it go, Sheppard." Everything about Ronon radiates danger.

But John can't let it go. Head full of images that probably don't belong to him and memories that he cannot clearly place, John only knows that Ronon once loved another, enough that her death destroyed a part of Ronon that the Satedan could never again share.

Share with him, John. His lover.

This isn't the time nor the place for the discussion they're about to have, and John can't find it in him to care because suddenly Ronon is a stranger, some kind of alien entity unknown to John before now, and it doesn't matter that his hands have mapped the topography of Ronon's most secret places, doesn't matter that John's ridden him, sweating and sliding and sweet beneath him. Doesn't matter that John loves him and Ronon loves—loved...will love?—John.

It only matters that he's standing miles away on the far side of the cell, staring at nothing that John can see.

"What are you looking at, Ronon?" he asks, and John can't say why it's that question and not the innumerable others trying to choke their way up his throat.

Ronon shakes his head, releases whatever it was that he held with his gaze, and says, "There's nothing there, Sheppard."

And John says, "I know."

But he doesn't.

  
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.wraithbait.com/viewstory.php?sid=8163>  



	4. Nor Am I Out of It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the final installment in the series.
> 
> The title of the story is taken from Christopher Marlowe: "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it." Spoilers for many episodes, but particularly _The Real World_ , _Common Ground_ , and _Phantoms_.

In the dream, _he_ is sometimes with him.

Mostly, John's alone, though, in his head, and he likes it that way. When there are others, things get confused, flashing forward and back in his memory like old-fashioned film flying free of the projector.

He wishes...

But then he stops. There is no point in wishing to change things. This is reality now: small, windowless room. Round-framed single bed bolted to the floor. Sink and urinal bolted to the wall. No protrusions in sight.

Outside, he knows that there are shadows. Sometimes, there are interruptions in the thin stream of hope that penetrates the darkness of his hole, and he knows that they are out there. The shadow-people.

He isn't afraid that they'll kill him.

He's afraid that they won't.

In those moments, his heart squeezed tight in his chest, his breath building behind his teeth, John thinks that death is a mercy he'll never own.

But in the dream, there is another.

John can never quite make out his face, except as brighter marks in the darkness above him, but he feels the hands on his skin, like walking through cobwebs—he can't see them, but he knows they're touching him, and he sighs beneath that spectral pressure.

The sigh is a roar in the silence.

And the answering breath is hot on his throat. The scent lingers on the back of his tongue like a taste he once knew, and John thinks, ". . ."

But the name won't come.

He hates the dreams because they are one more thing that awareness can steal from him. He doesn't want to want anything.

This time, it's different. The shape of less-dark is smaller, the hands somehow harder and less real, both. He gasps and twists, sits up heaving, leaves the scant sustenance he's eaten on the floor beside his narrow bed.

"No."

It is the first word he's spoken in...days? Weeks?

He used to be John but now he's not-John. Still, those hands didn't belong on his body, in his skull, caressing the backs of his eyes and making him see...

Shadows interrupt the hope.

"Stop," he whispers, but there are no sounds.

Because he's strangling on a scream that crawls up his throat, raw with pain, and he wants to die, but the hand on his chest pinions him in place while fire impales him, and the faces around him float as he starts to black out, and he wishes the eye, the great, black eye, would close. He doesn't want them to see him like this.

He doesn't want _him_ to know how weak he can be.

"John!"

"What?" Irritated. It's the third time he's been interrupted, and all he wants to do is get through a freakin' game without having to pause it.

Ronon is standing next to the white couch in John's living room where John himself is perched, game controls in hand. The sun pours in cutting beams through the wide windows that look out over the trees in the valley below, and Ronon is silhouetted against them like some mountain god in L.L. Bean.

Flannel never had it so good.

John sighs. "Okay, sorry. I'm ready."

"I'll drive," Ronon says, snagging the keys out of the buffed silver dish on the table by the door.

"Alright, but if you get pulled over, Hammond's not fixing it this time."

The ubiquitous shrug.

"Right..."

And there for a moment is something not right, not right at all, about any of it—the apartment, which seems familiar but unreal. But everything is slippery in John's head, images sliding away down the long dark chute into darkness, and...

"Colonel Sheppard!"

"What?" Tired. He's so damned tired. Spent the day slogging through the mud on that godforsaken backwater planet, all for what amounts to a hill of beans—literally. A hill of soggy, stinky brownish-yellow beans that remind John of scat but that the biologists insist are legumes and the nutritionists assert are healthy for them.

If they taste like they smell, John predicts a riot in the mess.

"You missed your appointment for monthly vaccination this morning. You can't be neglecting your health, Colonel. You're too important to Atlantis. Am I going to have to have these fine gentlemen escort you to my infirmary?"

John glances up at usual Marine fixtures on either side of the mess doorway.

He shrugs. "Yeah, okay. Let me finish my coffee?" And he puts on that hopeful little boy smile that usually works.

"Now, Colonel."

Usually.

John sighs, downs the bitter dregs in one long gulp, drops the cup with a decidedly petulant clatter, and walks toward the door in what can only be called a deliberately insolent crawl.

He thinks he might hear, "Git," as Beckett bustles by, but he's too tired to laugh.

And he smells the antiseptic of the infirmary, even though he knows he's nowhere near it. The cloying taste sticks in his throat and he growls against it. If he opens his eyes to find himself strapped to a gurney, skin gone blue and ruined, he's not sure what he might do.

"John."

"Yeah," softly, the way he says it when it's a wonder that there's anyone there to listen.

"We must get up, John. We're expected in the gate room in an hour."

"An hour's plenty of time," he mumbles, leaning into the warmth of her lush body, nuzzling the space between her breasts and smelling himself there.

Wait. No. That isn't... . It's like the hands that are not- _his_. And though his flesh answers her insistent little hands, he groans against the surety that it is wrong, and suddenly he's terrified of opening his eyes.

And then the hands on him are gentle, wrapped around from behind, one resting on the gauze that covers the perfect place where a wound should be. _Doc insisted on a bandage anyway_ , he thinks he might have said, and there's a rumble of laughter he can feel through his back, and then a beard-roughened cheek against his jaw and a tongue tempting the corner of his smiling mouth, and John rolls in the embrace and takes the laugh down into him, where it makes him rumble, too, and later arch and scream with life and pleasure, even the memory of pain driven deep into the darkness beyond _him_.

"John." Agonized.

And she's staring at him in the way that means the world is going to end and someone's got to be the hero.

"Go," he says, already running, tossing a half-smile back over his shoulder as he sprints out of the control room toward the reactor going critical.

"Go!" he shouts again, passing two technicians and a botanist who are racing for the gate to take them to the relative safety of the alpha site.

Nothing will be safe if the Wraith take the base. And a single reactor isn't going to do the trick.

There's never a nuke when you need one.

Rodney's voice is a continual babble in John's ear, so he rips out the comm. link, still running, and ahead of them there's a figure, bigger than him.

Is it a wraith scout?

John puts on a burst of speed, pulls close enough to see the hair, realize it's Ronon, call out, "Hey!" before the Runner does what he has always been better at, outstripping John with a casual wave that John knows means a million things, all of them adding up to "Goodbye."

Chest heaving, eyes stinging in the darkness, he tries to run but finds himself bound, and he's cursing Carson and the nurses and the people who put him in that bed and then he hears his name, which he wants to ignore. He is not-John, and no one can tell him differently.

"John!"

And he's sick of people dying on him and he wants to be left alone. Whoever it is this time can go to hell, he decides, curling in on himself and covering his ears with his arms.

"John, you have to listen to me!"

"Fuck you," he might growl. But it's distant, muffled by the blood roaring in his head and the voices—there are voices, aren't there? And screaming?

"John, pay attention!"

He won't, he won't he won't he won't he won't.

"What are you, twelve?"

"Rod-ney," in just the drawl that annoys the physicist.

"Just touch the thing there... . The Thing!" He repeats himself and waves his hands. John is an idiot and clearly cannot be trusted around Ancient technology, gene or no gene.

John puts his hand on the scepter-like instrument and it glows and vibrates under his hand.

"I think our table is ready."

"Ha-ha," and then, "Hmm."

John hates the "hmms."

"What?"

"Oh, nothing, nothing."

"Rod-ney." Warning voice: here there be dragons.

"It's just an anomalous reading, I'm sure, nothing to worry about... You've had your shots, right?"

John removes his hand and tries to discretely wipe it on his shirt.

"Oh, for... It's energy, Colonel, not cooties!"

"I don't care. I'm leaving."

"John, stay with me. John. John."

There is suddenly an anchor pulling him away from the darkness, pulling him upward, so heavy, against gravity and nature and his instinct to recoil.

"No," he says, struggling, and he feels the hand on his arm and something warm on his forehead, warm and soft.

"John." Quieter now, but more insistent.

"John."

"No," he repeats like a spell, his only weapon to ward off the coming. If he opens his eyes, his dreams will end and then he'll have nothing again.

"Wake up, Sheppard."

And in the moment between open and awake, he sees a stretch of desert and the impossible face of a man long dead, crumpled like a metal bird next to the remains of his flight.

Then it is _him_.

"Ronon? Where was I?"

"You've had a fever, son," he hears from beyond Ronon's sheltering bulk. "You've had us worried sick."

His eyes are heavier than his intentions; they slide shut despite him. But as the gentler darkness falls, he hears a whisper against his skin.

 _Him_.

And _he_ says, "Sleep. I'll be here when you wake up."

Maybe.

***FIN***

  
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://www.wraithbait.com/viewstory.php?sid=8163>  



End file.
